In a perfect world, there is no money. There is no higher or lower classes or castes. There are only people and there are things but their value is ambiguous. The value of people's time is priceless. This is the opposite of how human life is valued today, where time is worthless and lives are priced at $250,000. We would value, above all else, happiness, livelihood, and effort. The work done by one person, in any field, would be equal to any other. Those of us who chose to mop floors would have their time viewed as equal to those who write computer programs or manage manufacturing. There is no specific value to a profession, only to the person's time. This kind of a world is definitely considered "Utopian" by today's standards. We can't imagine a world without money or without a class system. We find it hard to believe that their could be anything besides what exists for us today. How would it happen? How could that be? It would require: A system where work is work for the good of society, not for a monetary value and a sense of togetherness between people, an educated populace with a lack of greediness or selfishness. It would deliver happy, healthy people with little-to-no poverty and an overwhelming notion that everything we do, we do for our own good.
Work and receive everything you need to be happy and healthy. Want to become a doctor? Do it. Want to become a computer programmer? Do it. Want to mop floors? Do it. All of these professions would make the same "salary." Not money, but goods and services required to be happy and healthy. We, as a society, will need a wide range of work done in order to function, just as we do today. But those who decide higher education is not for them will not be thrown to the wolves, and those who do choose to pursue an education will do so at no cost. What they are doing, in both cases, is extremely important to the infrastructure of this society. We need both students and janitors. There is no difference between the work done by one and the work done by the other, in value. Each will get a place to live, with adequate space. Firms can poll people for demand for products or services they oversee. But there is no profit to be made. They would only exist to produce for humanity. Those producers can then meet the demands of the people by putting to work the right amount of resources and work into a product or service. The people can choose what to produce. I won't pretend to know all the details, but it can be worked out.
The relationships people would need to have would be so incredibly different from how we relate to each other today. There would be much more 'we' and nearly no 'I.' We would function for the good of everyone and there would need to be a universal acceptance of cooperation. Everyone in society works and devotes their energy into their profession for each and every other person's good as well as their own. That kind of mindset means that every person is kind and grateful to others around them. Think like how people tend to act towards those serving in the military. Everyone contributes for others. For example, a restaurant and its workers all serve food to people. Those people go to work and produce the grilles for cooking, the plates and silverware, the chairs, the building itself! And for all of that, they serve food in return, and their attitudes towards others would be that of those engaged in a mutually beneficial business deal. We would all immediately be friendly with everyone else because we are all working as one; in a large flowing mutually beneficial deal.
In this kind of a community people would have to labor less. There would be a job for every person willing to work. That means we all work less. The 40 hour work-week would never even be conceived. There would be no need to rush processes or be crazy efficient such as to treat people as capital. There can really be no deadlines because deadlines are scheduled for profit, mostly. We would not work on a time crunch, because time is valuable and precious and we all are entitled to our own time to live and be happy. We do not owe all of our time and emotional well being to some corporation to survive. We survive because we all deserve it.
This kind of Utopia does happen to have a name. It's Communism. It can work. But it has a lot of requirements that mostly involve people understanding the system and cooperating. We could have a society that binds together and helps others, instead of helping who can pay and turning away those who cannot. As humans we would be entitled to our own lives, not required to serve those with more only to receive less.
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